Congestion may ease with future turning lane

Friday

HOUMA -- It never fails. Every morning and afternoon, cars stack up at the north end of Country Drive waiting to turn either left or right from the two-lane street onto La. 24.

Hoping to alleviate some congestion on Country Drive by building a right turn lane, the Terrebonne Parish Council voted Wednesday to allow parish staff to buy land for the turn laneís proposed path.

Construction is at least three months away, parish officials said, noting that the parish and state governments both need to complete all land-sale documents and hire a contractor. The construction will last about 45 days and cost parish taxpayers roughly $130,000.

The 400-foot-long turn lane will be built on Country Drive for drivers turning right onto La. 24 and heading toward Bayou Terrebonne.

Angel Domangue, a Jeff Drive resident, said she regularly experiences the bottleneck on Country Drive in the mornings when dropping her child and other carpool kids off at South Terrebonne High School.

To get to the school on La. 24, Domangue has to take a right from Country Drive. Without traffic, the trip takes about five minutes, she said. In morning traffic, the travel time doubles or triples, based on the cross traffic on La. 24.

"Depending on what time you leave, you have to time it just right," the 35-year-old mother said.

When asked whether a right-turn lane would help, Domangue said she thinks it should help especially if finished by next school year.

"If they start that over the summer, that would be great," Domangue said.

Benton Drive resident Ilona Browning said she thinks the right-turn lane will only help a little.

Her neighborhood needs more outlets, she said, because the traffic backs up on Country Drive for at least a half a mile, especially around 7 a.m.

Drivers also need more bridges to get between East Park Avenue and East Main Street, Browning said. She suggested a bridge be built over Bayou Terrebonne across from Lafayette Woods Boulevard to connect the La. 24 couplet.

Councilman Pete Lambert, who represents Bourg, Pointe-aux-Chenes and Montegut, has been advocating a turn lane at Country Drive for more than a year because of the growing traffic and businesses near the intersection.

So far, all five of the landowners have agreed to sell parts of their property for the turn lane, said Joan Schexnayder, parish staff engineer. That means the parish will not have to use expropriation, a legal process in which private citizens are forced to sell their land at fair-market value to the government for public use.

The parish government is offering to pay $47,801 to the five land owners, but an exact amount for acres being bought was not available Thursday.

The project has taken about six months to get to this point because parish officials have had to follow state and federal guidelines for purchasing land, said Al Levron, parish capital-projects administrator.

The turn lane is part of a larger project to widen Country Drive from 9-foot lanes to 12-foot lanes with shoulders and subsurface drainage, Levron said.

The federal government is putting up 80 percent of that construction cost with the parish picking up the remainder. The state Transportation department is acting as the go-between for the parish and the federal government, so negotiations and land acquisitions have to get the stateís OK.

The widening is still more than a year away from construction, Levron said. So building the turn lane now is better for drivers, although the parish government is paying the whole bill.

"Itís a very logical and good decision," Levron said.

Lambert asked that the turn lane be built as soon as possible because, he said, he wants to get traffic improvements in place before the $15-million replacement of the Prospect Street Bridge. That work is scheduled to start in 2009 and will take four years to complete.

"Anything we can do before the Prospect Street Bridge is done," Lambert said, "will help that transition smoothly."

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